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I'm very invested in urbanist discourse (which is to say, all things that lend themselves to less cars and more people doing more walking/biking/transit). That

I'm very invested in urbanist discourse (which is to say, all things that lend themselves to less cars and more people doing more walking/biking/transit). That said, the fantasy of building a human-scale town from scratch is, unfortunately, a fantasy. The author is half correct in saying that we've forgotten how to build towns. It's better to say, the creation of new towns have become economically obsolete. Their niche is gone. Historically, towns formed organically around sources of value, such as farmland or rivers or mines or whatever, where many people making a living in the same region benefited from being in walking proximity, which enabled commerce. That concern just doesn't exist today, due to cars. You don't need a town with an inn when the truckers stay at motels and rest stops. You don't need a town square when people shop at the big box store on the highway and local producers are part of a complex global supply chain.

ghaff 5y ago
Something like Wengen in Switzerland is probably about as close as you get to something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wengen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wengen But obviously a mountain resort town has to be somewhere that outsiders want to vacation in and everyone who lives there is either in or supporting in some way the tourist industry.
zip1234 5y ago
I take this more as a thought experiment on how building a town without the primary nuisances of 'modern' places. Cars have enabled many things but they are not unequivocally good. I understand the positives, but they produce a LOT of negative externalities and there is significant cost to spacing things further apart.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > Cars have enabled many things but they are not unequivocally good. I understand the positives, but they produce a LOT of negative externalities and there is significant cost to spacing things further apart. Believe me, you're preaching to the choir here. My comment is really just to offer a counterpoint to the justifiable desire to create a "new world" without the troubles of the old one - most people aren't shopping for new lives, so these sorts of plans don't emerge organically in the way that towns did originally. And when "start over" towns built around some ideological principle do arise, they often fail comically[0]. [0] A fun read https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    > What they needed was a town that was small enough that they could come up and elbow the existing citizenry, someplace where land was cheap, where they could come in and buy up a bunch of land and kind of host their incoming colonists. And they wanted a place that had no zoning, because they wanted to be able to live in nontraditional housing situations and not have to go through the rigamarole of building or buying expensive homes or preexisting homes. Is this the kind of bad scenario that NIMBY activists organize to prevent (despite the issues created by their zoning policies not letting people move in)?
  - zip1234 5y ago
    That was indeed an interesting read. To be fair that sounds more anarchist/hippy commune than what the article today was about.
    - helen___keller 5y ago
      > To be fair that sounds more anarchist/hippy commune than what the article today was about To be more precise, Grafton was an attempt to "create" a new town governed by the ideas of Libertarianism, while the OP article is describing how to create a new town governed by the ideas of New Urbanism (roughly). The shared problem is that if you're founding a town on the basis of an ideology, you have a town full of ideologues, which isn't a very organic state and hence is prone to many unexpected issues
mulcahey 5y ago
"College Towns" are about the only non-obselete instance I can think of ... at least until college itself is considered obsolete by/for enough people.
- andrewnicolalde 5y ago
  Could that be because not as many people have cars?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    There are still plenty of cars around college campuses and parking is a perpetual issue. Certainly faculty and staff (and some students) drive in and park daily. And even a town built around a relatively small college like Hanover NH still has a population of over 10K people. ADDED: But, as others have noted, once you drive somewhere at least relatively close to where you're going, at least small to mid-sized campuses and associated towns are generally designed to let you walk to stores/restaurants/etc. fairly easily.
  - simpixelated 5y ago
    That's probably part of it, but I think the root is that a college campus is designed for people to use it without cars. Food, stores, classrooms, places to sit and meet are all built in and connected via walkways. Cars become unnecessary once you get to campus
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    That's likely a consideration, as are the concentrated sources of value that are classrooms and labs with face-to-face instruction, as well as interaction (both social and educational) among students. Online education is reducing the edge of the former, though the latter is still hard to replicate outside of a college town.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    A college campus is its own sustainable self-perpetuating institution. Or at least has been for much of the past century in the US (and elsewhere) as 1) an increasingly technological world has increased the need for an educated populace and 2) funding for college education has been readily available. You've also got a town structure which is based on a single identifiable economic centre, which doesn't generally rely on heavy industry or ag within that centre (information, knowledge, and people, as well as the support strucutures for them), and so your principle transportation problem is how to move a fair-to-middlin' mostly younger and healthier population around. Bikes and walking fit this mode well, the small population of elderly and disabled can be accomodated as edge cases. Keep in mind that in many small college towns, there's still a sizable commuter population. Some of that are students priced out of local housing, though the workforce is a much larger component, and may have commute patterns comparable to that of a large city (driving in from an hour or more away). The centralised nature of employment makes even rural mass transit or commuter shuttles viable.
thebradbain 5y ago
I would argue that, for better or worse, Marfa, TX in West Texas is a real manifestation of this essay. It's only a town of about 5000, completely walkable, and homes that were selling for $20k before news got out that it was a secret artist enclave just 10 years ago are now going for north of $1 million (even more eye popping when the median single family home price in the most expensive metro areas of the state, Austin and Dallas, are around $500k). Outside the town is farmland and oil fields. Inside the town is a collection of bars, restaurants, hotels, museums, and high art, all from a once-dying/repurposed small town on a defunct train line. "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine. See (also mentioned in that article) Seaside, Florida. https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/ https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/ https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unlikely-art-oasis-in-a-desert-town https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unli...
- helen___keller 5y ago
  There are plenty of small towns that can be managed and organized according to the principles of the article, and personally I think it's a great idea. I'm referring more to the idea of building a small town, presumably starting from scratch, as if you were playing Sim City or Cities: Skylines. I've never heard of Marfa but wikipedia suggests it was originally built around the 1880s as a Railroad Water Stop. The analogue today would be a "town" around a highway rest stop, which is generally not going to be built at human scale or with pre-war zoning and architecture. > "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine Absolutely. The major issue here is that if you're building a small town from scratch, it's not a desirable place to live / visit until it is built. And it's not "built" until you have several hundred people, at least, living there. But those people aren't going to want to build houses and live there if it's not a desirable place to live. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
  - lmm 5y ago
    The whole point of deliberately starting a new town with human-scale architecture etc. is to get around that chicken-and-egg problem, precisely because moving to a highway rest stop town would have all the problems you mention.
swiley 5y ago
I live in an artificial town that was constructed 10 or so years ago near a light rail station to the larger city to the north (and other similar "towns") so it's totally doable, it's just not for everyone.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  I'd love to read more about it. My impression is that this sort of "greenfield" doesn't exist because most established cities have surrounded themselves with low density suburbs. What's the name of the town/region?
  - dvdkon 5y ago
    Vienna's Seestadt Aspern fits that description and seems to me like a very good attempt at building a "new town" with its own centre and infrastructure. It's only a short train ride away from Vienna's center, but so are many other small towns and those are decidedly separate.
    - swiley 5y ago
      I'm actually posting from Reston Town center but yeah there are lots of examples around here.
      - joeaca04 5y ago
        Reston sucks ass
jppope 5y ago
I'd have to argue against the notion that towns/ European style cities are "economically obsolete". Yes, they are virtually impossible to build from scratch at the moment (zoning, building codes, developers, etc), but the economic value of walkable cities has never been higher. If you cross reference walkscore against our metropolitan areas in the US walkable cities (that are in warm climates) are our most valuable real estate... not to mention that they are the location for most of our companies participating in the "information economy" (military-industrial complex aside). Basically most Americans want to live in a walkable city with charm and community, but the way we built America post 1950 makes it very difficult.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  Just to be clear: existing towns are not economically obsolete. The economic conditions that led to the founding of small towns no longer exist, and in this sense the idea of "building a new small town" is obsolete (with some exceptions: eccentric millionaire building a planned community, an ideological sect with hundreds of people willing to uproot their lives to build somewhere that is not yet livable, "theme park" style for-profit destination towns like your disneylands or The Villages in Florida). This isn't a matter of zoning, building codes and developers (thats mostly a problem for existing towns/cities), this is a matter of economics. It takes impetus to create a new town/city, and in the modern economy that impetus almost always involves automobiles. Edit: updated my wording in the above post to make clear that existing towns aren't obsolete, just the creation of new ones
  - judge2020 5y ago
    This was basically Walt Disney's idea of E.P.C.O.T. before his passing, and specifically focused on commuting via 'peoplemovers' and walking instead of cars. https://youtu.be/tKYEXjMlKKQ https://youtu.be/tKYEXjMlKKQ
  - sjg007 5y ago
    I live in a thriving small town.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
nradov 5y ago
Disney built a human-scale "town" from scratch as Celebration, Florida. Some people seem to like it. The basic formula could probably be repeated elsewhere.
- adolph 5y ago
  Another is Seaside Florida. Seaside is an unincorporated master-planned community on the Florida Panhandle in Walton County, between Panama City Beach and Destin.[2] One of the first communities in America designed on the principles of New Urbanism, the town has become the topic of slide lectures in architectural schools and in housing-industry magazines, and is visited by design professionals from all over the United States. The town rose to global fame as being the main filming location of the movie The Truman Show. On April 18, 2012, the American Institute of Architects's Florida Chapter placed the community on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places as the Seaside – New Urbanism Township. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside%2C_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside%2C_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show
  - taurath 5y ago
    Strangest bit of trivia is that the Truman Show was filmed there, and the house that the titular character lived in is owned by Matt Gaetz, the extreme right wing congressperson under investigation for sex trafficking.
yodelshady 5y ago
I live in a UK town a hundred times that size, and still have reasonable access to proper green space. This does require: -modern multi-storey buildings; -public transit. Which requires similar infra to cars. Economically, a town this size supports a train station to other towns, which is... huge. I've gone to after-work drinks in a different, similar-sized town. So has my partner. And environmentally, there's no real objection to building up a bit (it might be a net positive, by shoring up aforementioned train station). Adding a whole new town anywhere in the region would be a nightmare. And frankly, for all the current (deserved) bad press on flats and the romanticism of single-family homes, an awful lot of the latter are terrible. Leaking, creaking, cold, subsiding, dangerous wiring and something else rhyming. I'm not meaningfully further from nature, either.
williamsmj 5y ago
Fun fact: you need not just a town, but a legally incorporated city, if you want a liquor store. A trailer park with a population of 188 is the densest incorporated city in Texas (and one of the 100 densest cities in America) for precisely this reason: https://twitter.com/DanKeshet/status/1350633707036663809 https://twitter.com/DanKeshet/status/1350633707036663809, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_City,_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_City,_Texas.

ghaff 5y ago

Something like Wengen in Switzerland is probably about as close as you get to something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wengen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wengen But obviously a mountain resort town has to be somewhere that outsiders want to vacation in and everyone who lives there is either in or supporting in some way the tourist industry.

zip1234 5y ago

I take this more as a thought experiment on how building a town without the primary nuisances of 'modern' places. Cars have enabled many things but they are not unequivocally good. I understand the positives, but they produce a LOT of negative externalities and there is significant cost to spacing things further apart.

helen___keller 5y ago
> Cars have enabled many things but they are not unequivocally good. I understand the positives, but they produce a LOT of negative externalities and there is significant cost to spacing things further apart. Believe me, you're preaching to the choir here. My comment is really just to offer a counterpoint to the justifiable desire to create a "new world" without the troubles of the old one - most people aren't shopping for new lives, so these sorts of plans don't emerge organically in the way that towns did originally. And when "start over" towns built around some ideological principle do arise, they often fail comically[0]. [0] A fun read https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  > What they needed was a town that was small enough that they could come up and elbow the existing citizenry, someplace where land was cheap, where they could come in and buy up a bunch of land and kind of host their incoming colonists. And they wanted a place that had no zoning, because they wanted to be able to live in nontraditional housing situations and not have to go through the rigamarole of building or buying expensive homes or preexisting homes. Is this the kind of bad scenario that NIMBY activists organize to prevent (despite the issues created by their zoning policies not letting people move in)?
- zip1234 5y ago
  That was indeed an interesting read. To be fair that sounds more anarchist/hippy commune than what the article today was about.
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    > To be fair that sounds more anarchist/hippy commune than what the article today was about To be more precise, Grafton was an attempt to "create" a new town governed by the ideas of Libertarianism, while the OP article is describing how to create a new town governed by the ideas of New Urbanism (roughly). The shared problem is that if you're founding a town on the basis of an ideology, you have a town full of ideologues, which isn't a very organic state and hence is prone to many unexpected issues

mulcahey 5y ago

"College Towns" are about the only non-obselete instance I can think of ... at least until college itself is considered obsolete by/for enough people.

andrewnicolalde 5y ago
Could that be because not as many people have cars?
- ghaff 5y ago
  There are still plenty of cars around college campuses and parking is a perpetual issue. Certainly faculty and staff (and some students) drive in and park daily. And even a town built around a relatively small college like Hanover NH still has a population of over 10K people. ADDED: But, as others have noted, once you drive somewhere at least relatively close to where you're going, at least small to mid-sized campuses and associated towns are generally designed to let you walk to stores/restaurants/etc. fairly easily.
- simpixelated 5y ago
  That's probably part of it, but I think the root is that a college campus is designed for people to use it without cars. Food, stores, classrooms, places to sit and meet are all built in and connected via walkways. Cars become unnecessary once you get to campus
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  That's likely a consideration, as are the concentrated sources of value that are classrooms and labs with face-to-face instruction, as well as interaction (both social and educational) among students. Online education is reducing the edge of the former, though the latter is still hard to replicate outside of a college town.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  A college campus is its own sustainable self-perpetuating institution. Or at least has been for much of the past century in the US (and elsewhere) as 1) an increasingly technological world has increased the need for an educated populace and 2) funding for college education has been readily available. You've also got a town structure which is based on a single identifiable economic centre, which doesn't generally rely on heavy industry or ag within that centre (information, knowledge, and people, as well as the support strucutures for them), and so your principle transportation problem is how to move a fair-to-middlin' mostly younger and healthier population around. Bikes and walking fit this mode well, the small population of elderly and disabled can be accomodated as edge cases. Keep in mind that in many small college towns, there's still a sizable commuter population. Some of that are students priced out of local housing, though the workforce is a much larger component, and may have commute patterns comparable to that of a large city (driving in from an hour or more away). The centralised nature of employment makes even rural mass transit or commuter shuttles viable.

thebradbain 5y ago

I would argue that, for better or worse, Marfa, TX in West Texas is a real manifestation of this essay. It's only a town of about 5000, completely walkable, and homes that were selling for $20k before news got out that it was a secret artist enclave just 10 years ago are now going for north of $1 million (even more eye popping when the median single family home price in the most expensive metro areas of the state, Austin and Dallas, are around $500k). Outside the town is farmland and oil fields. Inside the town is a collection of bars, restaurants, hotels, museums, and high art, all from a once-dying/repurposed small town on a defunct train line. "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine. See (also mentioned in that article) Seaside, Florida. https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/ https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/ https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unlikely-art-oasis-in-a-desert-town https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unli...

helen___keller 5y ago
There are plenty of small towns that can be managed and organized according to the principles of the article, and personally I think it's a great idea. I'm referring more to the idea of building a small town, presumably starting from scratch, as if you were playing Sim City or Cities: Skylines. I've never heard of Marfa but wikipedia suggests it was originally built around the 1880s as a Railroad Water Stop. The analogue today would be a "town" around a highway rest stop, which is generally not going to be built at human scale or with pre-war zoning and architecture. > "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine Absolutely. The major issue here is that if you're building a small town from scratch, it's not a desirable place to live / visit until it is built. And it's not "built" until you have several hundred people, at least, living there. But those people aren't going to want to build houses and live there if it's not a desirable place to live. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
- lmm 5y ago
  The whole point of deliberately starting a new town with human-scale architecture etc. is to get around that chicken-and-egg problem, precisely because moving to a highway rest stop town would have all the problems you mention.

swiley 5y ago

I live in an artificial town that was constructed 10 or so years ago near a light rail station to the larger city to the north (and other similar "towns") so it's totally doable, it's just not for everyone.

helen___keller 5y ago
I'd love to read more about it. My impression is that this sort of "greenfield" doesn't exist because most established cities have surrounded themselves with low density suburbs. What's the name of the town/region?
- dvdkon 5y ago
  Vienna's Seestadt Aspern fits that description and seems to me like a very good attempt at building a "new town" with its own centre and infrastructure. It's only a short train ride away from Vienna's center, but so are many other small towns and those are decidedly separate.
  - swiley 5y ago
    I'm actually posting from Reston Town center but yeah there are lots of examples around here.
    - joeaca04 5y ago
      Reston sucks ass

jppope 5y ago

I'd have to argue against the notion that towns/ European style cities are "economically obsolete". Yes, they are virtually impossible to build from scratch at the moment (zoning, building codes, developers, etc), but the economic value of walkable cities has never been higher. If you cross reference walkscore against our metropolitan areas in the US walkable cities (that are in warm climates) are our most valuable real estate... not to mention that they are the location for most of our companies participating in the "information economy" (military-industrial complex aside). Basically most Americans want to live in a walkable city with charm and community, but the way we built America post 1950 makes it very difficult.

helen___keller 5y ago
Just to be clear: existing towns are not economically obsolete. The economic conditions that led to the founding of small towns no longer exist, and in this sense the idea of "building a new small town" is obsolete (with some exceptions: eccentric millionaire building a planned community, an ideological sect with hundreds of people willing to uproot their lives to build somewhere that is not yet livable, "theme park" style for-profit destination towns like your disneylands or The Villages in Florida). This isn't a matter of zoning, building codes and developers (thats mostly a problem for existing towns/cities), this is a matter of economics. It takes impetus to create a new town/city, and in the modern economy that impetus almost always involves automobiles. Edit: updated my wording in the above post to make clear that existing towns aren't obsolete, just the creation of new ones
- judge2020 5y ago
  This was basically Walt Disney's idea of E.P.C.O.T. before his passing, and specifically focused on commuting via 'peoplemovers' and walking instead of cars. https://youtu.be/tKYEXjMlKKQ https://youtu.be/tKYEXjMlKKQ
- sjg007 5y ago
  I live in a thriving small town.
- chrisco255 5y ago

nradov 5y ago

Disney built a human-scale "town" from scratch as Celebration, Florida. Some people seem to like it. The basic formula could probably be repeated elsewhere.

adolph 5y ago
Another is Seaside Florida. Seaside is an unincorporated master-planned community on the Florida Panhandle in Walton County, between Panama City Beach and Destin.[2] One of the first communities in America designed on the principles of New Urbanism, the town has become the topic of slide lectures in architectural schools and in housing-industry magazines, and is visited by design professionals from all over the United States. The town rose to global fame as being the main filming location of the movie The Truman Show. On April 18, 2012, the American Institute of Architects's Florida Chapter placed the community on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places as the Seaside – New Urbanism Township. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside%2C_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside%2C_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show
- taurath 5y ago
  Strangest bit of trivia is that the Truman Show was filmed there, and the house that the titular character lived in is owned by Matt Gaetz, the extreme right wing congressperson under investigation for sex trafficking.

yodelshady 5y ago

I live in a UK town a hundred times that size, and still have reasonable access to proper green space. This does require: -modern multi-storey buildings; -public transit. Which requires similar infra to cars. Economically, a town this size supports a train station to other towns, which is... huge. I've gone to after-work drinks in a different, similar-sized town. So has my partner. And environmentally, there's no real objection to building up a bit (it might be a net positive, by shoring up aforementioned train station). Adding a whole new town anywhere in the region would be a nightmare. And frankly, for all the current (deserved) bad press on flats and the romanticism of single-family homes, an awful lot of the latter are terrible. Leaking, creaking, cold, subsiding, dangerous wiring and something else rhyming. I'm not meaningfully further from nature, either.

williamsmj 5y ago

Fun fact: you need not just a town, but a legally incorporated city, if you want a liquor store. A trailer park with a population of 188 is the densest incorporated city in Texas (and one of the 100 densest cities in America) for precisely this reason: https://twitter.com/DanKeshet/status/1350633707036663809 https://twitter.com/DanKeshet/status/1350633707036663809, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_City,_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_City,_Texas.